If so many people think God wrote a book IMHO it becomes relevant to study it at least superficially just so you can co-exist and communicate with all these people.

The stories in the book are mostly not history but the book itself and how it came to be certainly is.

Seriously if God is omnipotent and knows everything this book of his shows a strong sense of humor rather than much intelligent design. Like having bits and pieces garbled by running them back and forward through ancient humanoid versions of modern day OCR, machine translation and political censorship.

I love the Septuaginta bit (not in this video) where mythically 70ish scholars were secluded for 70ish days and each came up with his own Greek translation and they were all mythically identical. Where in reality the translation took decades, was a team effort that garbled the texts to appease current rulers and added whole new books.

For best effect, click the CC button for the auto-generated machine translation.

It's hilariously terribad.

HAHAHHAHAHA. No→ありませんします

massive fail, but some of the translations were fairly decent considered the difficulty for a machine translator to deal with idiomatic and colloquial phrases. Still, not good enough to really hold a realistic conversation on even simple topics, since it seems to have trouble with anything longer than short phrases (and sometimes even with them, as in the "no" instance haha).